“Goddamn it!” Squire said. “You’n me, we need to work together. I can find ’em!”
It struck me that he was speaking with more authority than he’d previously displayed, but I didn’t concern myself with this. Wasn’t that it didn’t tweak my interest, just I was more interested in the way my head was emptying out, like a car engine giving little ticks as it cools.
Squire went to hammering at me, trying to rouse me to action, and finally I said, “What you want me to do, asshole? Drive you around in a stolen van ’til we get popped?”
“We don’t hafta go far. Won’t be on the road more’n a few minutes.”
“They been gone an hour…maybe more. You think they just circling out there?”
“Trust me, man. I know what I’m talking about.”
“Trust you?” I said. “Fuck you! Now I told you, leave me be.”
I stepped away along the shore and stopped at the very edge of the water, my shoes sinking into the muck, wanting to restore the glum yet comforting acceptance into which my thoughts had been sinking. Squire followed me, giving orders, pleading, working every angle. Didn’t matter what he said, it was all the same to my ears, a yammering that bored holes in my skull and poured itself in hot and heavy like lead into a mold. I told him to shut up. He kept at it. I told him again to shut up and it didn’t even put a hitch in his delivery. I was acting like I had shit for brains, he said. Behaving like a child. Didn’t matter what he said. Every word hardened into a white-hot ingot, stacks of them crowding the space between my ears. I tried to see past him, past the heat growing inside me, looking to cool my eyes in the lavender cave of sky among the last clouds where the moon floated. It wasn’t a help.
“What do I gotta do, spell it out for your sorry ass?” Squire said. “What the fuck’s it gonna take to get through?”
He punched at my shoulder with the heel of his hand.
“Don’t be doing that,” I said.
“It don’t bother you, you set there and watched Ava and them roll off into the fucking sunset, but this here”—he punched at me again—“that bothers you?”
A thready strip of cloud spooled out across the moon, a golden bridge unraveling.
“You are hillbilly shit piled high, y’know that?” Squire said. I heard him kick at the ground and then his voice came from a distance away: “Guess you must like the idea of ol’ Ava licking your girlfriend’s pussy.”
I turned on him, seeing only those two ugly round faces, one atop the other mutant-style, and I lifted my right hand. I was kind of surprised to see the gun—guess I’d forgotten I was holding it—and maybe it was surprise twitched my trigger finger, or maybe another flickering snake tongue of anger. Or maybe I just wanted to kill him, though I had the notion somewhere in the back of my mind that he was not a man, he’d eat the bullet, lie there a while, then sit up all of a sudden the way he’d done back in Ocala. The shot punched out the left eye of his lower face. He gave a melancholy grunt, like a hog disappointed by its supper, and went spinning to the ground. Heart’s blood came from his chest in such a hurry, it might’ve had somewhere more important to go. Speckles of wet dirt clung to his cheek. His one true eye was open blind and the other was pressed into the earth. I thought I heard a voice of wind and rustling grass say my name in welcome.
• • •
You might not understand, but then again you might, how when you reach the end of the road and still find yourself breathing, the unraveled threads that tied you to your life resemble a puzzle you could easily have solved if you’d been one ounce smarter or one inch less crazy, and you think now that you’ve gained a perspective, you can probably develop some sort of reasonable explanation for all the crap you hadn’t understood, but when you gather those threads up they hang limp from your fist and don’t none of the frayed ends match, and you realize they weren’t really connected, they had no more connection to each other than stalks of dead grass floating on marsh water, and everything you depended on being true was just a tricky kind of emptiness that looked like something real, and so when I tried to fit Squire cooling out at my feet and the bossy way he’d acted in with Ava’s stories, it only made a deeper puzzle, one I knew I’d never get straight.
I kept the gun aimed at him, hoping he’d sit up, halfway hoping he would just so I could shoot his ass again. Anger seeped out of my skin, leaving me shaky. The painted eye on Squire’s chest smoldered. I had an urge to throw the gun into the marsh, but I didn’t have enough fire in me to follow through and I dropped it on the ground. Thing to do, I realized, was to gather food and whatever else I could use from the lodge and hightail it into the marsh. I’d need the gun. My chest felt scraped hollow and filled with cold gas. It cost me some effort to reach for the gun. I bent over halfway, put my hands on my knees, and stalled there. A black rope was being pulled through my head, scouring out the positive thoughts.
“Stand up straight, motherfucker!”
Rickey was leaning against the side of the porch, holding a sawed-off twelve-gauge with a taped grip. Didn’t appear he could see out of one eye, but the other was working good and pinned on me.
“Come thisaway!” he said.
I walked a few steps toward him. He gestured with the sawed-off and told me to sit.
“You a cocksure son-of-a-bitch, leaving me alive.” Rickey spat a dark wad of blood and saliva.
The wet soaked through the seat of my pants. Rickey started toward me, weaving a little, then thought better of it and leaned back against the porch. His face was all lumped and discolored, like an atomic war radiation victim.
“I saw you kill that boy,” he said. “Kill him how you’d do a sick dog. You didn’t useta be that cold, man. Something happen in Raiford make you that way?”
I didn’t have no answers for him.
“You liked to kill me, but I don’t kill so easy.” Rickey fumbled in his pocket and fetched out a cell phone. “One fine morning a few years from now, they be strapping you down and fixing to kill you. You remember me on that day, Maceo.”
He thumbed three numbers, gave a show of doing it so I’d know he was calling 911. I drew up my knees and rested my head on my arms. Rickey talked for a minute, too low for me to hear.
“Hey, Maceo!”
He’d moved to the steps and was sitting on the bottom one, the sawed-off angled across his knees.
“Hands up! Who wants to die?” he said. “How you like them apples, huh?”
A queer little road of moonlight slithered off along the water into the east. I wished I could follow it. I wished there was a tree with hundred-dollar bills for leaves growing out behind the lodge, and that Rickey was too weak and sore to pull off both barrels before I could reach him, and that the end of this world was the beginning of the next, and I wished I’d had more time with Leeli.
“I feel them police dogs panting,” Rickey said, stretching out his legs and getting comfortable. “I feel that heat humming out along the road.”
It come to seem all like a painting, then. One you’d see in a museum with a brass plate on a frame enclosing a night on the marshlands south of South Daytona, a night wild with stars and a wicked moon hanging like a bone grin among the remains of the running clouds, a gray tumbledown lodge with a stove-in roof and a lumpy, bloody man sitting on the steps, aiming a chest-buster at another man sitting in the grass, and a corpse lying near the water’s edge, gone pale and strange. It would look awful pretty and have the feeling of something going on behind the scenes. Like silver nooses were hanging from the stars and important shapes were hiding back of the clouds, big ones with the heads of beasts, showing a shade darker than the blue darkness of the sky. It was that rich, dark blue give the picture a soul. The rest of it was up to you. You could study it and arrive at all sorts of erroneous conclusions.
“Damn if I don’t believe I can smell ’em,” Rickey said. “Y’know the smell I’m talking about? That oiled-up leather and aftershave smell them state pigs have?” He spat again. “You shouldn�
�t go fucking over your friends, man. It just don’t seem to never work out.”
I took another stab at explaining things to myself. Witches and spacemen and scum of the earth. Somewhere in all that slop of life was a true thing. I knew in my gut it was an amazing thing, unlike any you’d expect to meet up with on your way through hell, and I believed if I was to chew on it a time, jot down a list of what I saw and what I thought, I might understand who Ava and Carl and Squire were. But I’d always been bound for this patch of chilly ground. It wasn’t worth pursuing how I got there, whether it was some old dog of a reason bit my ass or fate jumped the curb and knocked me down an unknown road.
A thought of Leeli twinged my heart. Appeared I’d cared about that old girl somewhat deeper than I knew.
The air horn of an eighteen-wheeler bawled out on the highway, something huge going crazy, and trailing behind it, almost lost in the roar of tires and engine, a siren corkscrewed through the night.
Rickey spat up more blood.
Like they say, shit happens.
I figure that about tells it.
THE DRIVE-IN
PUERTO RICO
Things went well for Colonel Galpa after the war. Indeed, they went so well that wherever he traveled he became the object of a celebration. Whether in the north of the country with its gloomy mountain villages, or in the volcanic central region, or in the jungles along the coast, his arrival was a signal for the townspeople to set aside their daily concerns and honor the national spirit that had produced such a remarkable hero. For ten years he rarely passed a night without a splendid hotel room, a surfeit of food and drink, and a beautiful woman for a companion, these the gifts a grateful citizenry offered in tribute to the defining act of his heroism, the shooting down of three enemy jets during the single air battle of the war with Temalagua. Sometimes, upon learning the specifics of the colonel’s heroism, strangers might suggest that a tally of three was insufficient to warrant such prolonged reverence; but their judgment failed to take into account the fact that the country was small, with a tradition poor in heroes (unmartyred ones, at any rate), and when viewed in this light, Colonel Galpa’s hour in the sky assumed Herculean proportions.
At one point nearly a dozen years after his moment of glory, the colonel returned to his parents’ home in San Pedro Sula, intending to settle there and assist his father in running the family flour mill. The mill was in financial straits, yet this was not Colonel Galpa’s sole motive for returning. He was weary of parties, of boring speeches and floral tributes offered by schoolgirls; he wanted a family of his own, and friends. The ordinary consolations of an ordinary life. But at the time the government was undergoing a crisis of confidence, and by promising that certain valuable contracts would be awarded to his father, the leaders of the party in power persuaded him to go back out onto the road so as to remind the people of their one actual achievement: the winning of a backfence war. In truth, there were many—notably the owners of the bars and clubs and hotels frequented by the colonel—who would have been happier had he remained in San Pedro. Like the colonel, albeit for more venal reasons, they had reached the conclusion that enough was enough, and they frequently expressed the opinion that the colonel’s heroism must have been an aberration, that he was at heart a freeloader; yet none dared to voice such complaints in public, where they might have had some effect, and so, despite this attendant irony, due in large part to politics and inertia—estates often confused for one another—the colonel continued on his joyless rounds.
On occasion, someone unacquainted with the colonel would ask the identity of the slender graying man with the complexion of an Indio puro sitting quietly in a secluded corner of a noisy party, and when they were told this was the famous Mauricio Galpa, they might say, “What curious behavior for the guest of honor!” “Oh, the colonel’s simply tired,” would be the response. Or, “The colonel’s got a touch of dysentery.” Or perhaps the person to whom the comment had been directed would make a fist with his thumb extended and put the thumb to his lips, implying that the colonel had overindulged in drink. But the reality of the situation was that while Colonel Galpa had once exulted in his good fortune and availed himself of every pleasurable opportunity, he had come to the conclusion that there was something ghoulish about these quasi-ritualistic bacchanals inspired by the deaths of three men whose faces he had never seen. He felt a certain disquiet regarding his fame, and had taken to remembering the three men in his prayers; but since he was not a particularly religious sort, this merely exacerbated his emotional state and caused him to think of himself as a hypocrite.
In August of the millennial year, as he had done for the previous nineteen years, Colonel Galpa traveled to Puerto Morada on the Caribbean coast. Each August, bureaucrats from the capital who could not afford better would swarm into the town to take their vacations—vacations in name only, because they spent their days sitting on the porches of the little hotels along the beach, typing reports commissioned by their superiors who had fled to Cannes or Majorca or Buenos Aires to escape the heat. With the bureaucrats came the whores, hundreds of them from every corner of the country, and following the whores came the journalists, both groups seeking a drunken bureaucrat from whom they could extort something of value. From the government’s perspective, August in Puerto Morada was the perfect showcase for the colonel. There were any number of gatherings at which he might be feted, and usually one or two unoccupied journalists could be persuaded to feature him in a nostalgia piece. For these exact same reasons Colonel Galpa loathed visiting the town and always managed to arrive late at night, when no one was likely to notice him.
The hotel where the colonel stayed each August was a venerable two-story colonial of white stucco with a red tile roof, shaded by bougainvilleas and palms. When he had first checked in nineteen years before, he had been given a fine bedchamber and sitting room overlooking the beach; these days, however, he chose to occupy the smallest room on the ground floor facing inland; this was not a consequence of his diminished status, but due to the fact that it housed a considerable population of lizards, many of which crawled in over the palmetto fronds that drooped through the window. Wherever he spent the night, be it Puerto Morada or the capital or a village in the Miskitia, the colonel enjoyed sitting on his bed with a single lamp lit and watching the lizards that clung to the walls, their bright sides pulsing with breath. He had no scholarly interest in them; he could barely tell a skink from a chameleon. He liked them because they decorated his solitude without disturbing it. Over the years he had developed a peculiar affinity with them. When he entered the room they neither froze nor kept their distance as they might in the presence of another human being, but instead perched on his nightstand and ran across his feet and otherwise continued on their tremulous mosquito hunts. Though he was a practical man who rejected the animist traditions of his forefathers, he allowed himself to flirt with the notion that lizards might be spiritual functionaries whose purpose was to oversee the travels of those fated to be exiles in the country of their birth.
On this particular evening, Colonel Galpa’s attention was captivated by a large indigo lizard with delicate black markings on its face that from several feet away resembled the fanciful mask of a harlequin. When he examined it at close range, bending so that his head was level with its own, it stared back at him, unblinking and serene, its pupils expanding to cover nearly all the retinal surfaces, so that the eyes resembled tiny orange suns in total eclipse. He derived from the stare a startling sense of energy and presence, its intensity such as one might receive from looking into the eyes of a child. Though he assumed this to be a misapprehension, the result of fatigue, the longer he regarded the lizard, the sharper this impression became.
“Who are you?” he asked playfully.
The lizard craned its neck toward him, and the colonel felt as if a hook had snagged in the silk of his soul and was tugging gently, seeking to draw him forth, like a thread drawn through the eye of a needle. Dizzy, he straighte
ned, and felt instantly steadier. Still curious, he bent again to the lizard, and again was possessed by the sense that he was in danger of spilling out of his body. A checkup, he thought, might be in order. The dizziness could be a symptom of some difficulty with the inner ear. With a last glance at the lizard, he switched off the light and got into bed, where he lay awake for a while watching the frilly shadow of a palmetto frond nodding on the white sheets. The idle churning of his thoughts dredged up recent memories, trivial plans, old preoccupations. He recalled a woman with whom he had danced in Trujillo; he decided that after breakfast he would return to his room and unplug his phone; and he saw a sectioned-off panel of deep blue sky, sunlight dazzling the scuffmarks on a plastic canopy, and felt an immense vibration. He closed his eyes against this vision, concentrated on the darkness behind his lids, but did not pray.
• • •
In the morning, before even the most zealous of the bureaucrats were awake, Colonel Galpa set forth along the beach, heading for the Drive-In Puerto Rico. It was his favorite place in Puerto Morada, a bar-restaurant constructed of lime green concrete block, three walls and a metal awning that was rolled down each night to make a fourth, with a service bar and a jukebox inside, a room out back where the owner lived, and a wooden deck out front, furnished with red picnic tables, where one could sit shaded by coco palms, and gaze out across the Caribbean. The place had no discernable connection with either drive-ins or Puerto Rico, except for the fact that it faced eastward toward that captive island, and thus most people assumed that the name reflected the idiosyncratic nature of its proprietor, Tomas Quu, an elderly Miskitia Indian reputed to be an hechicero, one who listened to the spirits and could work small charms. A wizened man with a long gray braid and a face as wrinkled and dark as an avocado, he had once been a soldier and had, according to rumor, performed his duty with exceptional valor. On occasion the colonel tried to draw him out on his experiences, but Tomas was not inclined to speak on the subject. That morning the old man was on his knees inside the restaurant, painting a corner of the mural that spread across the rear wall.
Eternity and Other Stories Page 21